AWS r5.12xlargevsAWS r5.8xlarge

r5.12xlarge pairs 48 vCPUs with 384GB of RAM at $3.0240/hr On-Demand (about $2177/mo at 24×7). r5.8xlarge pairs 32 vCPUs with 256GB at $2.0160/hr (~$1452/mo). r5.8xlarge is 33% cheaper per hour than r5.12xlarge ($1.0080/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **r5 family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (Intel Xeon (x86_64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: r5.12xlarge gives you 48 vCPUs and 384GB of RAM, r5.8xlarge gives you 32 vCPUs and 256GB. AWS scales pricing close to linearly within a family, so picking the right size is mostly about right-sizing your workload, not getting a better deal per vCPU.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are r5.8xlarge delivers ~40% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (376 vs 525 points per $1/hr). That's the cleanest signal we have for "which one runs your workload faster per dollar," but it only matters if your workload is single-thread-bound; for parallel workloads the multi-core scores (39262 vs 26098) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when r5.12xlarge drops to $0.9315/hr and r5.8xlarge drops to $0.4688/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick r5.12xlarge when your workload is closer to memory-optimized (memory-bound work — in-memory databases, real-time analytics, large caches). Pick r5.8xlarge when it's closer to memory-optimized (memory-bound work — in-memory databases, real-time analytics, large caches). When neither side is obviously right, the cheaper hourly rate usually wins for fault-tolerant batch workloads, while the higher single-core score usually wins for latency-sensitive web traffic. The regional pricing tables linked from each instance page below show where each is currently cheapest — sometimes a >20% regional gap flips the comparison entirely.